Advice on Remote Backup Services?

a-freeman asks: "Faced with the prospect of doing automated weekly backups for several servers with some 200 GB of files each, I have been looking for a remote backup solution. A couple of recent articles consider backup to hard drives, although I feel this still fails the 'separate snapshot in time' aspect of good backup policy, since with many of the solutions that I have seen, you will likely lose all your backups if your array gets corrupted. However, CD-Rs and DVDs are just too damn small. Can anyone recommend a remote backup service or interesting combination of hosting service + FTP/RSync/etc., or am I stuck buying a tape drive?"

Comments

Remote in what way?

[toygeek]

Are you looking for remote as in "in the next rack over" or "somewhere across the internet" or somewhere in between? In short, define "remote."

Tape is probably the best bet so far. As far as getting a good 'image' of it, tar it and stick it on a tape. Since you don't want hard drive array, and optical is out, tape is going to be the best way, I think, unless another /. reader has a better idea.

Re:Why wouldn't you want a tape drive?

[override11]

I agree. We have a NAS maxtor MaxAttach, which has a SCSI port on the back just for a tape drive. I think that the largest Maxtor drive right now is right around 600 gigs (ours is 300 gigs), but it would be simple enough to replace the drives with larger ones. Then just slap a LTO drive on the back and setup your backup to tape to run every night, and overwrite your backup to disk to keep the maxtor clean, and you will have a fast recent backup and slower snapshots on tapes. :)